I’ll get this out of the way right now: I watch Pawn Stars, the show on History Channel featuring the guys at Gold and Silver Pawn in Las Vegas. A lot. I should not. And nor should you.

In case you don't know what this show is, the premise is pretty simple. Whereas other pawn shop-related reality shows put an emphasis on unruly customers, security breaches and the downtrodden locals, Pawn Stars focuses on the items that people bring in to sell. Most importantly, though, it aims to examine the history behind those items. This is how the show is on something like the History Channel in the first place – or perhaps how the channel can get away with showing it. But it’s because of this, the show’s central premise, that it’s actually not worth your time.

Over at Quartz last week, Kevin Ashton revealed a simple truth: “you didn’t make the Harlem Shake go viral – corporations did.” He chalks up the idea that the viral phenomenon – essentially an endlessly replicated video of a solitary dancer in a room full of people gyrating alone until the beat dropped and they were instantly surrounded by everybody else, who were also suddenly dancing like maniacs – was spontaneous is a “myth.” Basically, the Harlem Shake meme (Ashton disputes that it even was one) was the product of savvy marketing, wherein corporations hopped on the bandwagon early in an attempt to score revenue from the ads YouTube places prior to the start of videos. The endless replication was just that, but the primary spark that got the whole thing was very familiar: a revenue opportunity.

Since I’d written about the Harlem Shake back in February, a couple people sent me the article. I responded to one, from my colleague Sonya, saying that it all makes one wonder whether there will ever be a true viral meme in the future. She replied simply that the real question seemed to be whether there ever was one in the first place. Which, frankly, is a very fair point. I would argue that there have been, probably. Things like Epic Sax Guy don’t seem to have the same kind of commercial potential as the Harlem Shake, but then again, who knows? I could be wrong. After all, as Sonya noted not long ago at Maclean’s, many of the viral Tumblr blogs were, in fact, either established or promoted by familiar entities like, in one case, media megabrand, ClearChannel.

What all of that means is possibly nothing more than the simple fact of there no longer being a dichotomy or confrontation between the ‘mainstream’ and subcultures or, more generally, counterculture.

"Our children in a twentieth-century information environment have to process more data than any human being in any previous culture of the world. Our children from early infancy are engaged in extraordinarily hard work, and that work is mainly just growing, growing up because to grow up in a modern electronic environment is a fantastically complex and difficult job. It's also a job which threatens to deprive people of identity, the personal concept. One of the peculiarities of an electronic environment is that people become so profoundly involved in each other that they lose that sense of private identity. This is one of the peculiar cruxes of our time that people, precisely because they become profoundly involved in one another in an all-at-once simultaneous field of happenings, then begin to lose their sense of private identity because identity used to be connected with simple classification and fragmentation and non-involvement. In a world of profound involvement, identity seems to evaporate."

And so here we are, ingesting our yearly prescription of celebrity pornography, care of a morally questionable doctor with an attractive smile and soothing voice timber, streamlined for easy consumption by having been boiled down to a two-hour brainless extravaganza of shiny dresses, shiny skin, shiny teeth, shiny jewelry and shiny lives — an emulsified Pabulum hosted by the Good Doctor himself, Ryan Seacrest, a smiling nitwit of the highest order, successful only for being able to turn even the dullest celebrity PR bullshit into the slickest ear-warming babble, designed at its soul to cover the brain in a somastatic, intellectually-limiting poison goo that hardens instantly on contact.

And then, finally, we’re ready for the show: the longest public collective group ego wank on the Planet, designed not so much to get off on art, but the idea of art as an abstracted something, as a means, rather than an end. Rather, that is, than a substantive anything. Art that is often so meaningless, that is so much sign and so little signifier that poor old Walter Benjamin himself would likely quite happily bleed from the ears rather than even have to consider such a sad state of replicated affairs. Just a copy of a copy of a copy on into infinity, xeroxed forever in an endless nothingness of Hollywood atavism and bad, stale ideas regurgitated over and over again to young audiences as something new, and marketed equally ham-fistedly to their parents as some kind of bizarre exercise of socially constructed faux nostalgia. Just a one-note song with nowhere to go except louder, for ever and ever.

When former News of the World editor Paul McMullan argued with Steve Coogan on Newsnight last week, he pointed out a very important detail: there is an audience that needs to feed on information. The problem is that information has less and less meaning the more it is consumed. As the UK deals with the phone hacking scandal, Canada is also pondering the role of its mass media, thanks to a CTV bureau chief publicly expressing his disgust at the business after he quit his job. The two instances are related because at the heart of both is an audience that devours pure information.

In his blog, Kai Nagata, a former bureau chief for CTV in Quebec, took his profession to task for its superficiality, banality, and corporatization (among other things). His post went viral, thanks to it being forwarded on Twitter countless times, even by revered film critic Roger Ebert.

“When you have to balance the interests of your shareholders against the interests of the viewers you supposedly serve, the firewall between the boardroom and the newsroom becomes a very important bulwark indeed,” Nagata wrote on his site. CTV’s continued desire to focus on “growing eyeballs” left him a little cold.

Without equating the phone hacking and whatever Nagata believes CTV is guilty of, both situations imply a serious problem in the system. Since Nagata’s blog, and with it his disillusionment, has gone viral, many of the commenters on his post have congratulated his tenacity and honesty. Those who normally watch and read have simultaneously lamented what they apparently agree is the degradation of the media.

But certainly, somewhere in all of this, that audience must come into play.

There are probably a lot of reasons why political attack ads work: either because they get attention on their own, or because of the endless discussions that turn the content over and over, rehashing it for the sake of an argument about the debasing of political discussion in Canada. And fair enough, those are valid points. We would be better off without sloganeering that immediately attacks policies at the knees, hacking them down to stump material. But the reason attack ads - and the slogans they trumpet - still work has probably less to do with our general inability to have a substantive discussion on policy, and more to do with the fact that we’ve taught ourselves not to everywhere outside of the realm of political discussion.

The argument that Marshall McLuhan made in Understanding Media - his famous piece on the postmodern condition of electric communication - was about how our mass media affect our societal actions -- that “we shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” In that light, we could worry that attack ads could be ultimately change the overall political discourse in Canada. That is, if we were to limit it that much.

However, McLuhan also wrote about our willingness to regress to a form of communication based on abstracted signs, and given that, attack ads exemplify more a symptom of a current, ongoing problem than the potential cause of it.

Like pretty much everyone on Twitter Sunday night, I was excited that Banksy had done an intro for The Simpsons. Given that the show has for the last few years struggled to regain any sense of current cultural legitimacy, involving Banksy - the noted British graffiti artist - seemed like a legitimately cool idea, even if it probably was a couple of years too late. But then I saw it. And, frankly, I don’t get the hype. Here it is, for those who haven’t seen it. Discussion, as usual, after the jump.